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arXiv · 2606.20474

UltraQuant: 4-bit KV Caching for Context-Heavy Agents

Inesh Chakrabarti·David Limpus·Aditi Ghai Rana·Bowen Bao·Spandan Tiwari·Thiago Crepaldi·Ashish Sirasao
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Abstract

Context-heavy agents place substantial pressure on the key-value (KV) cache: long prefixes are reused across many short turns, while concurrency determines whether the serving system can keep GPUs utilized. We study 4-bit KV-cache compression for this setting, using TurboQuant-style rotation and codebook quantization as a quality anchor and vLLM FP8 KV caching as the deployment anchor. We report three contributions. First, we frame 4-bit KV caching around multi-round agent workloads where task quality, cache residency, and serving throughput must be measured jointly. Second, we describe the practical design choices needed to make the 4-bit path robust, including asymmetric K/V treatment, Walsh-Hadamard rotation, QJL removal, and block-scale variants. Third, we present serving optimizations on AMD GPUs, including optimized decode-attention kernels and UltraQuant, an FP4 approximation path that uses FP8 queries, FP4 KV tensors, UE8M0 group scales, and native scaled-MFMA support on CDNA4. On an adaptive-SLO replay of production Claude Code traces, UltraQuant sustains 2.71x (MiniMax-M2.5) and 4.38x (Qwen3-235B) the qualified-request throughput of the BF16 baseline, matching or exceeding hardware FP8 KV while using half the KV bytes. UltraQuant delivers its largest gains in long-context, high-concurrency, memory-constrained serving regimes.

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Inesh Chakrabarti, David Limpus, Aditi Ghai Rana, Bowen Bao, Spandan Tiwari, Thiago Crepaldi, Ashish Sirasao. 2026-09-11. UltraQuant: 4-bit KV Caching for Context-Heavy Agents. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20474

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